Ralph Lauren’s bastion of prepsterdom, Rugby, just kicked off an Insider Sale with 40% off a majority of their spring gear—this is stuff you can wear right now, a rare treat compared to most sales hawking off-season wares. In particular, we’re liking the university chinos (in every color imaginable) and this summer-ready ticking stripe cotton sack jacket, but there’s plenty more to dig through. Get after it, gentlemen.

We ran across this short collared oxford in Gant’s 60 year Anniversary catalog, and we couldn’t help indulging a little nostalgia. Dubbed the “Rugger,” it debuted in the early 70s and finding its way back into stores (specifically Barneys flagships and New York’s Gant outpost) on the heels of the brand’s 60th Anniversary.

But for a shirt that’s pushing 40, it’s handling the years pretty gracefully. It’s a combination of the oxford and the rugby shirt, both longtime staples of the Gant catalog, but the last few years of Americana-fiddling make it look strangely adventurous. That white placket, for instance, wouldn’t look too out of place at a Gilded Age show. Fortunately for the price point, Gant got there first.

Down Market: The gathering financial storm probably won't make it easier to get dinner reservations at New York's better restaurants, but at least your waiter will have a MBA from Wharton. [NYT]

A Pinch of Saffron: Look, we're as confused about aesthetic and practical value of these "T Takes" mini-movies over at The Moment Blog as the rest of you. But this one here has Saffron Burrows, so... [The Moment]

The 100-year-old company that invented the rugby shirt has something to say about Ralph Lauren's attempted hijacking of the game. Canterbury of New Zealand, established in 1904, made the first rugby jersey for a friend of one of the founders, an avid player. The rest was sartorial history. Fast forward to 2005, when Lauren launched his Rugby line replete with skull and crossbones imagery lifted from the team insignia of British educational landmark the Rugby School, where the sport was first played in 1823.

"All mankind is running to monograms this year," wrote the New York Times Style section in June, 1902 (click for the fin-de-si‚àö¬Æcle puff piece.) Apparently, monograms were the pants or ties of the age. Since then, what originated with the crests of kings became a not-so-subtle talisman of status more than style, practical in white-collar and dry-cleaning Post-War days and was eventually almost extinguished by the rise of the logo. Granted, monograms have been mostly the provenance of oil-executives since the Patrick Bateman era, but that's no reason not to dapple in initialization…